The present invention relates to the field of digital computer systems, and more specifically, to a method for determining extremum values in a dataset.
Analytical database systems manage very large amounts of data and are optimized for queries that may read large fractions of it. At the same time, they offer the complete querying power of Structured Query Language (SQL). As such systems do not focus on online transaction processing (OLTP) load (i.e. involving point queries) they typically do not index each data row but heavily rely on scan performance. A typical task of analytical database queries is to compute aggregates on large data sets, such as the minimum or maximum value.